The Photographer of Mauthausen by Salva Rubio

“I was on my own, as I surely always had been, from the beginning to the end.” This thought underlines Salva Rubio’s graphic novel “The Photographer of Mauthausen,” which is set in the concentration camp of the same name during Nazi Germany.

The photographer in question is Francisco Boix, a Spanish photographer who survived the war but died at the young age of 30. His brave act of smuggling photographs of deaths at the camp, which eventually became hard evidence of the atrocities committed there, made him a hero of sorts. The novel details his experiences at the camp, his survival, and life after.

At just 118 pages the novel is a quick read but by no means is it easy. It begins with Francisco waiting at a café by the border for his sister Nuria. We never come to know anything about Nuria except that he had promised that they will meet again. From there, we are taken ten years back into Mauthausen, a ‘Category 3 camp, set aside, according to Heydrich’s classification, for “irredeemable” prisoners.’ Francisco and his family have just arrived by train but soon enough, he loses his father, and is left all alone.

Slowly, we get to know of life in the camp through Francisco’s detailed descriptions. We get to know of the hardships, the torture, and worst of all, the deaths. Prisoners are pushed over cliffs, thrown onto barbed wires, and subjected to medical experiments with their deaths being recorded as suicides or accidents. Francisco works in the privileged Identification Department of the camp thanks to his experience as a press photographer earlier, and he is soon noticed by Paul Ricken, the head of the department. Ricken makes him his assistant for his bizarre photography expeditions that involved the German taking pictures of prisoners in the throes of death.

“I understood perfectly well what these strange, artistic photos meant: this madman thought he could turn death into art!”

Once Francisco realized this, he became determined to use his access to the lab and try to preserve as many negatives as he could. The rest of the novel is about the high risks and the many people it took to ensure the photos, and the people themselves, escaped destruction.

Although this retelling is a mixture of imagination and reality the collective experience of the prisoners is far from the truth. The horrible beatings, the injection of gasoline into people’s bodies, the starvation and so much more are what every prisoner must have gone through. I can only imagine, vaguely at that, but I nor anyone could ever fully understand because as Madame Vaillant-Couturier says,“there are no words, no images which can make people understand something they haven’t lived through.”

Francisco’s images did serve as hard evidence, though, and helped convict some of the Nazis involved in the activities of Mauthausen in the Nuremberg trials. His endeavour to save the negatives was daring, despairing, and extremely risky and was done with the ultimate aim of preserving history and memory. But despite all the trouble only about a 1,000 negatives were saved from a total of 20,000, author Salva Rubio informs us. The rest have disappeared into oblivion. Like so many untold stories from the war.

The artwork, done brilliantly by Pedro J. Colombo, supports the gripping narration with vivid blues and greys emphasizing the dreariness of the camp only punctuated with sepia or muted green tones to differentiate photographs. An interesting aspect that I noted was that most of the prisoners had almost the same facial features – bushy eyebrows, close-cropped hair, and full lips – but the Germans were distinctly different. Is it Rubio’s way of showing how prisoners were treated simply as a big, heaving mass of flesh?

I immensely enjoyed reading this novel. ‘Enjoyed’ is perhaps the wrong word to use for a subject as bleak as this, and perhaps I should say that Rubio/Francisco had my full attention. I look forward to reading more novels like these. There are always more stories to be told. I hope, like Francisco, there were people who did not give up.

Big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me an ARC for a review!